In recent years, as display technology continuously advances, users have become more and more demanding on display quality of displays, such as image resolution, color saturation, and so forth. In process of purchasing a display, whether or not the display is capable of displaying a 3D image is also taken into consideration in addition to high image resolution and high color saturation.
Currently, a fixed beam splitter is mainly employed in a 3D image display technique, such as adhering a parallax barrier or a lenticular lens onto a display panel to respectively project an image provided by the display panel to the left and right eyes of an user, thereby forming a 3D image in the human brain through binocular parallax generated after the two eyes respectively received the image. It should be noted that a 3D image can be produced by employing a fixed beam splitter in a spatial-multiplexed manner, such that the resolution of the 3D image is reduced although a 3D display effect of a display panel can be achieved. Besides, the 3D display equipped with the fixed beam splitter can only display 3D images but not 2D images. Thus, the practicality of such 3D display is relatively low.
To resolve said issue, a 2D/3D switchable display device including a switch unit and a display panel has been developed under the existing techniques. In general, the switch unit includes two substrates, electrode layers respectively disposed on the two substrates, and a liquid crystal layer disposed between the two substrates. The 2D/3D switchable display device mainly utilizes the optical characteristics of the liquid crystal layer to control display light, so that the switch unit has the splitting ability. By this way, the 2D/3D switchable display device is capable of displaying 2D images when the switch unit is turned off and displaying 3D images when the switch unit is turned on.
However, the current 2D/3D switchable display device at least needs to include two substrates for the display panel and two substrates for the switch unit, which the total number of substrates comes to four. As such, under the condition that the thickness of the display device can not be further reduced, the applications thereof will be limited and its commercial competitiveness will also be decreased.